Google tells government it should be allowed to scrape whatever it wants to train AI

Google told a government review of Australia's Artificial Intelligence Ethics Framework that it wants "copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems". Basically, let us harvest whatever we want for our gain for free and if someone wants to opt-out, they can just list it in the site's robots.txt (which can be easily ignored). How about Google only scrape sites that opt-in, along with some sort of reimbursement for the privilege of using my hard work for your harebrained AI schemes? I'm personally not against using my stuff for training AI, it's the lack of reimburse that shits me. You're gonna make $50b/yr off this data and my data consists of 0.000001% of it? Give me $500/yr or fuck off.

NBN misses FTTC/FTTN to FTTP upgrade traget by over 40%

NBN's let loose with how many people are taking up the offer of a free upgrade from FTTN/FTTC to FTTP and it's weaker than expected. Only 89,626 premises have bothered to upgrade over the last 12 months, far behind NBN's target of 157,000 and a small fraction of the over 2 million premises eligible. That said, 16,000 were upgraded in July & August alone so it is picking up pace. NBN hasn't explained why take up is so far behind their expectations, but reckons now that ISPs have come to grips with the upgrade process, they'll be more proactive in marketing it to customers. My gut feeling for the lack of upgrade demand is that people desperately want faster internet but do not want to pay $100/m+ to get it. The value proposition just isn't there for the mainstream customer.

ABC abandons Twitter kinda, Intel's GPU drivers are spying on you, Slack to get UI revamp

• The ABC is abandoning the bulk of its X/Twitter accounts to "shield team members from toxic interactions", but will keep four accounts going - ABC News (@abcnews), ABC Sport (@abcsport), ABC Chinese (@abcchinese) and ABC Australia (@abcaustralia). I guess the team members handling those accounts can handle the toxic interactions?
• Intel's latest Windows GPU drivers are packed full of telemetry that includes "the types of websites you visit", "how long and how often you visit certain types of sites", "how you use your computer", "other devices in your computing environment" and a bunch of other stuff. Very gross, but at least you can opt-out, unlike Nvidia's drivers.
• Slack is getting a UI overhaul, it's biggest ever apparently. There's a new sidebar on the left with shortcuts to various Slack features, then a big pane, almost half the window, dedicated to Direct Messages. One of the new features is the Activity window, that shows "all your messages, mentions, and reactions across all your Slack workspaces all in one place".

Nineteen glorious years of Open Street Map, may it never die

Happy 19th birthday to Open Street Map. It's hard to underestimate the importance of this open source project. Practically every mapping company - TomTom, Apple, Meta, Microsoft & more - contribute to OSM and provide a strong alternative to the commercially driven Google Maps that could die at any time if Google decide it's not profitable enough. OSM is also the starting point for some great projects. I use an app called Water-Map regularly. It collects the "amenity=drinking_water" objects in OSM and puts them on a nice map so I can find somewhere to get some delicious free water when I am thirsty. The "amenity=charging_station" object is another useful one that apps like A Better Route Planner take and make an easy way to plan EV road trips with. Thanks Open Street Map and the lovely contributors who feed it data! By the way, StreetComplete is an Android app that makes it fan and easy to contribute to OSM.